Bright Dart

by Suninfo

  ‘I almost did, but then I had second thoughts.’

  ‘And now you’re sure?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve had time to think it over and I’d like you to take command if anything happens to me. I propose to tell the others if you’ve no objection.’

  ‘Why me? Why not Gerhardt? He set the whole thing up.’

  ‘I think you’re the best man for the job, it’s as simple as that.

  Besides, if this operation goes sour, Gerhardt will try to save his own skin and then it will be every man for himself.’

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  ‘And you think I can save the others?’

  ‘I think you’d have a damn good try.’

  Ottaway shook his head doubtfully. ‘You flatter me,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll have an even chance of bringing it off. I’ve made certain arrangements with the Dutch Underground should things go wrong, and that’s another reason for not taking Gerhardt into my confidence. I don’t want them betrayed to the Gestapo.’

  ‘I thought you trusted him?’

  ‘Only to a point, Jack. When you have to work with men such as Gerhardt and Kaltenbrunner it’s as well to keep both eyes open.’

  Ottaway’s jaw dropped. ‘Kaltenbrunner?’ he said faintly.

  ‘You’re surprised? How else do you think our conspirators could remain at large in Germany today if they didn’t enjoy the protection of the head of the RSHA? Someone has to steer the Gestapo agents of Amt IV away from them.’

  ‘I can’t believe it, Colonel.’ His voice rose sharply. ‘Why should he help them?’

  ‘Because, like a great many others close to Hitler, he wants to see Bormann dead. The trouble is that if things get rough, Kaltenbrunner won’t hesitate to change sides again.’

  ‘Jesus, what are we letting ourselves in for?’

  ‘The chance perhaps to save thousands of lives.’

  ‘Or throw our own away.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do it if I thought it was a suicide mission.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you would, but who wants to take a major risk when the end is in sight?’

  ‘As things stand, I think the war will drag on into the spring of next year, but if we succeed in killing Bormann, it might not.

  That’s why I say we could save thousands of lives.’

  ‘Maybe we don’t all share your vision, Colonel,’ Ottaway said quietly, ‘but at least we’re here with you and I suggest we leave it at that.’

  ‘You’re right, of course, our various personal motives are immaterial.’ Ashby leaned back in the chair and crossed his ankles. ‘Tonight we shall cross the frontier in two groups—

  Cowper, Quilter, you and I will form one party, Gerhardt will be in charge of the other. I’m not anticipating any trouble.’

  Ottaway smiled wryly. ‘I wish I shared your confidence,’ he said.

  ‘We’re moving on a proven route through Singen, Stockach and Ulm.’

  ‘Who proved it?’

  ‘A number of our escapees,’ Ashby said coolly, ‘and unlike us, they were trying to get out of Germany, which is much more difficult.’

  130

  ‘We could still run into trouble when we cross the frontier.’

  ‘We might,’ Ashby conceded patiently, ‘and then we must take evasive action.’

  ‘And if we can’t?’

  ‘Then we shall just have to kill anyone who gets in our way, won’t we?’

  Kastner opened his eyes slowly and found himself staring at an unfamiliar ceiling but, because his skull felt as though it had been split in two and there was a thick coating on his tongue, it was some minutes before he realised that he was lying in a strange bed in a strange room. He was also alone and that too was odd because he vaguely remembered a woman with red hair who’d tried to pick him up in a bar somewhere. He kicked the blankets to one side, swung his feet on to the bare floorboards and sat on the edge of the bed nursing his head in both hands. His eyes peering through the spread fingers focused on a black satin blouse and suddenly his heart began to thump wildly, because it was at that same moment that he noticed the scratch marks on his chest.

  He squinted blearily at the room but there were no outward signs of a violent struggle and he sighed with relief. The woman must have risen early and walked out on him in disgust, and it was typical of a slut like her to leave her blouse lying on the floor where she had dropped it the night before. As he stared at his own clothing piled in an untidy heap in the overstuffed armchair, the thought occurred to him that she might have gone through his wallet before she left. He lunged across the room to his jacket and took the wallet out of the inside pocket, checked the contents and found that he had misjudged her. Whatever her faults, the woman was not a thief.

  And now, despite the hangover, he felt much better in himself.

  Some of the bitterness which Gerda had provoked had drained away, and for some reason that defied logical explanation, he believed that this chance encounter with a common prostitute had a lot to do with it. Of course, he’d taken a risk in allowing her to pick him up, but apart from the few scratches on his chest, it had been worth it. Kastner changed his mind as soon as he entered the tiny washroom.

  Partially dressed in her underclothes, she was lying in the bath with her neck resting between the taps, and seeing her again, he immediately had total recall. She had laughed at him because the alcohol had made him impotent, and in a fit of blind rage he had grabbed her neck with both hands and choked the life out of her. And afterwards, he had dumped her in the bath 131

  and tried to flush her skirt and slip down the lavatory and the water had overflowed and spilled out across the floor. It was still damp underfoot but most of it had drained away, and somewhere in the flat below he knew that there must be a tell-tale patch on the ceiling and it was only a question of time before someone noticed it.

  Although his one desire was to get out of the flat before anyone called, Kastner steeled himself to act calmly and methodically.

  He dressed quickly, checked his appearance in the mirror on the dressing-table and satisfied that, apart from the stubble on his chin, he looked presentable, he went to the door and opened it stealthily. Hardly daring to breathe, he moved out on to the landing, crept down two flights of stairs, cautiously opened the front door and stepped out into the street. Werner’s bar was just around the corner and now he understood why she had thought it unnecessary to wear a coat over her skirt and blouse.

  And even worse was the sudden realisation that he had left the car all night in the side street facing the S Bahn. From past experience he knew that the detectives of the Criminal Police Division would soon put two and two together if some officious Berliner had thought to make a note of the registration number.

  So what if they do trace the number, he thought uneasily, they’ll simply find that it’s one of the pool cars belonging to the Prinz Albrechtstrasse Headquarters, and why should they bother to pursue that line of inquiry in a city where there were thousand upon thousand foreign workers any one of whom might have committed the crime? He took comfort in the knowledge that the population of Berlin still numbered close on four million and that he was therefore worrying himself unnecessarily, but obviously the longer her body remained undiscovered the better it would be for him.

  It was essential that he left the city at the first opportunity and fortunately he had a cast-iron reason for doing so. Having already convinced himself that he would be safe once he left Berlin, Kastner had closed his mind to the fact that he had no alibi to account for his movements on the night of the murder.

  The farm which was situated two kilometres north of Gremmendorf and about a kilometre east of Route 51, was too big for one man to handle, especially for a man like Gunther Jost who had lost an arm in Russia with the 16th Oldenburg Airborne Infantry Regiment.

  He was for ever badgering the State Labour Office in Münster for additional help and they, in their turn, were growing more than a little tired of his complaints. In the past three mon
ths he had rejected no less than fourteen of the men they’d sent him and, as 132

  one harassed official remarked, the trouble with Jost was that he seemed to think that the pool of foreign labour was a bottomless well which existed solely for his benefit. Fortunately for their peace of mind, Gauleiter Lammers had taken a personal interest in the problem of labour supply and demand, and thanks to his influence, Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments and War Production, had agreed to increase their quota of foreign workers.

  Such was Lammers’s concern that he had even gone to the trouble of personally sorting out Jost’s problem. With four foreigners reporting to the farm on Thursday and with the promise of help from soldiers who were awaiting posting from their depot, the officials at the State Labour Office were agreed that Jost would have no difficulty in lifting the potato crop.

  The potato crop was the least of Jost’s worries. Since ten that morning he had been waiting for a load of chemical fertiliser which, for the fifth day running, the Department of War Agriculture had promised to deliver without fail. He was, by nature, a sceptical man and had learned never to accept their word on anything but today they’d sworn that the truck had actually left the depot yard and he’d been inclined to believe them this time. No doubt, if he phoned them again, they’d say that the lorry must have broken down on the way.

  From behind the railway embankment in the far distance, a Fieseler Storch rose lazily into the air from the airfield at Loddenheide and banking sharply, headed towards the village of Telgte. As it passed low overhead, the loud puttering noise of its tiny engine disturbed the grazing cattle and sent them galloping across the field. Jost spat expressively into the dirt and walked into the barn. The trouble with the Luftwaffe, he thought, was that whenever you really needed them, they were never around.

  Leastways, that had been his experience in ’41 when the Oldenburg Regiment had emerged from the wooded and hilly country of Moldavia-Bessarabia and entered the endless Steppe of the Ukraine.

  God, but that had been a bloody awful country. It was just one vast plain covered with corn and sunflowers and damn all else apart from a few peasant huts. And we could have been alone out there for all we knew because for days on end, the regiment never saw a sign of a flanking unit, and half the time it was out of contact with Divisional Headquarters. And we were short of just about everything—transport, mortars and field guns—you name it, he thought, we hadn’t got it. And Christ help you if you were unlucky enough to get hit because there weren’t any ambulance cars to whisk you back to a nice base hospital where there were clean sheets on the bed and pretty nurses to look 133

  after you. The only thing we had in the way of ambulances were horse-drawn carts and it took them bloody near three days to get me back to an advanced dressing station. He looked at the empty sleeve on his jacket and smiled bitterly. The grenade which had wounded him had smashed his hand—the delay in medical treatment had cost him the arm.

  A heavily laden truck, its worn propshaft whining in the differential and slapping against the universal joints, ground its way into the yard and slowly backed up to the barn. The engine died in a fit of coughing and the door slammed as the driver jumped out of the cab.

  He shouted, ‘Is anyone at home?’

  Jost walked out into the sunlight. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Your name Jost?’

  ‘It is.’

  The driver removed his flat cap and scratched his head. ‘I’ve got thirty sacks of fertiliser for you.’ He eyed Jost’s missing arm.

  ‘I don’t suppose you can give me a hand to unload them, can you?’

  ‘You’d be surprised what I can do with one arm.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief. I’ve got a bad back and I didn’t fancy shifting that lot on my own.’

  ‘We’re not going to shift anything if we stand here gabbing all day.’

  The man replaced his cap and dropped the tailboard. ‘You’ve got a point there,’ he said. ‘Tell you what though, I don’t fancy the look of the stuff inside the sacks.’

  Jost’s heart skipped a beat. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Well, I mean, it’s just a heap of grey ash.’ Blackened teeth showed in a ghastly smile. ‘Manufactured in Poland they do say.

  No knowing what it started out as.’

  Jost stared at him with loathing. ‘I’d watch my tongue if I were you, friend,’ he said coldly. ‘You’ve got a warped and dangerous sense of humour.’

  ‘What are you getting so het up about?’

  Jost grabbed hold of a sack and swung it over his shoulder.

  ‘Jokes like that make me sick.’

  ‘Supposing there’s a grain of truth in it?’

  The suggestion made him sick with anger. ‘If such things are being done in our name,’ he said savagely, ‘then God help Germany.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘All right, let’s get on with it, I can’t stand here gossiping all day—I’ve got work to do even if you haven’t.’

  134

  It took them under forty minutes to unload the truck but after the carrier had departed, Jost spent considerably longer than that searching for and identifying the specially marked sacks containing the arms, ammunition and uniforms which Force 272

  would need.

  Once the lights of Schaffhausen were behind them, they struck out in a northerly direction through the woods, and keeping roughly parallel to the railway, they crossed the frontier road without incident just before midnight. Moving on a compass bearing of thirty degrees to avoid the village of Singen, Ashby then led his group through the hills towards Stockach which he planned to reach in time to catch the first train to Ulm. MI9 had been correct in forecasting that he would experience little difficulty in crossing the frontier in the Schaffhausen area because it was ill-defined and infrequently patrolled, but, until they were clear of Stockach, he’d known all along that, as strangers, they had more to fear from the suspicious nature of the local inhabitants than from the police or the army.

  Gerhardt had already discovered this truth. His party, crossing the frontier an hour ahead of the others, had veered too far to the east and, emerging from the woods, had found themselves on the wrong side of Singen. In trying to work their way round the village, they had bumped into a far too friendly drunk who, despite every effort to shake him off, had followed them at a discreet distance like a stray dog looking for someone to adopt him. His nerves stretched to breaking point, Gerhardt had finally sent the others ahead, and lying in wait, had killed the man with a knife.

  The victim was not a friendly drunk. He was, in fact, feeble-minded and was treated like a child by the villagers of Singen; he was amiable, anxious to please and he talked a lot but nobody really paid much attention to him. In killing him, Gerhardt had made his first error of judgment.

  135

  16

  COWPER JOINED THE queue which had formed outside the booking office in time to see Ashby and Quilter show their tickets at the barrier and pass through to the platform. He tried convincing himself that, if they’d got away with it, there was no conceivable reason why he and Ottaway shouldn’t, but this piece of logic failed to stop the churning sensation in his stomach. He fixed his eyes on a propaganda poster in the entrance hall which showed a group of three small children gazing up in admiration at the bareheaded figure of a godlike infantryman whose face, turned towards the east, defied the Bolshevik hordes. The legend underneath stated that he was the saviour of Europe, but there was little resemblance between this figment of Goebbels’

  imagination and the pale, short-sighted Wehrmacht soldier queuing beside him.

  The queue moved slowly forward and as they drew close to the window, the soldier elbowed Cowper to one side and pushing in front of him, asked for a return to Pfullendorf. All it needed to turn one insignificant little man into an arrogant lout was a badly fitting uniform. There was a time, earlier in the war, when any civilian would have given way to
a serviceman, but not any more.

  Now only the foreign workers were expected to show respect.

  The woman behind the counter said, ‘Next.’

  Cowper placed the suitcase on the ground. ‘Two to Stockach,’

  he said hastily.

  ‘Don’t waste my time—this is Stockach.’

  It was a stupid error, the sort of childish mistake that drew unwanted attention to himself. ‘I’m sorry,’ he stammered, ‘I meant Ulm.’

  ‘Single or return?’ the woman said grumpily.

  ‘Single.’

  ‘Thirty-eight marks.’

  Cowper pushed four tens through the grill, waited for the change and the tickets, and picking up the suitcase, walked towards the barrier where Ottaway joined him. The ticket collector barely gave them a second glance but a man in a dark overcoat did. He stood in their way and as they came closer, he snapped his fingers officiously.

  136

  ‘Your papers,’ he said abruptly.

  Cowper took out his leather wallet and exposed the identity card behind the piece of celluloid.

  ‘You’re a foreigner?’

  ‘Belgians,’ said Ottaway. ‘We volunteered to work for Germany.’

  ‘Did I ask you?’

  Ottaway smiled apologetically. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but we are together.’

  The man ignored him and turned his attention to Cowper once more. ‘Where are you both going?’

  ‘Ulm. We’ve been ordered to report to State Labour Office; our work here is finished.’

  ‘There are no foreign labourers in Stockach,’ he said icily.

  ‘We were working near Singen.’

  ‘Yes? Doing what?’

  Cowper moistened his lips. ‘Felling trees.’ He remembered Ashby’s briefing and had a flash of inspiration. ‘We didn’t get on with the Poles—they were uncivilised.’

  ‘Untermenschen.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it precisely.’

  ‘I can understand how you felt. It is quite wrong that such good friends of the Reich as you should be forced to share their company.’ A gold tooth flashed as he smiled at Cowper for the first time. ‘Your wallet,’ he said cheerfully, ‘I hope you have a pleasant journey.’